Future Perspectives - Alternative fuels: Valuable work

Posted: Friday, May 09, 2008

We're feeling the squeeze. Fuel prices have hit record highs and there seems to be no end in sight.

When it comes to oil prices, that is.

But for Dan Geller, who's been researching alternative fuels at the University of Georgia for more than 10 years, it's something he and his colleagues aren't seeing in quite the same way as the rest of us.

"For me, high petroleum prices is a good thing," he says, "because the work I started on 10 years ago is actually having some value now. ... And it means that people are going to be moved to action to do something that we should've done a long time ago."

Geller straddles two worlds - literally. In 1996, the same year he began his graduate program at UGA studying biodiesel, he co-founded the successful independent label Kindercore Records. By night, you might find him spinning tunes as a DJ at Go Bar, or in one of several Athens bands as a well-known member of the music scene. But by day, this UGA researcher is talking to people around the state and studying alternative fuels - biofuels, namely ethanol and biodiesel - the energy of the future.

Aside from the research side, what else does your job entail right now?

Since 2005, I've been talking to anybody and everybody who wants to start a biodiesel plant in the state and advising them whether they should or shouldn't. ... It's not the most lucrative business to be in if you don't know what you're doing. ... We work with ethanol, we work with Thermochemical processing, we work with all the biologically-related fuel industries within the state.

From what I've read so far, when it comes to alternative fuels we're about 30 years away from any kind of true replacement for oil.

Right, yeah, the number is arbitrary, really, but yeah, it's more than 10 years.

MULTIMEDIA

VIDEO: Watch as UGA research engineer Dan Geller talks about the school's ongoing work to help convert algae to biofuel:

OK, so what happens if - as some experts predict - oil runs out in the next 10 years?

You know, it's one of those things where they keep finding new deposits of oil...

Right, there was that big discovery off the coast of Brazil.

Yeah, I mean, they are likely always going to find more oil deposits if they dig deep enough - I shouldn't say always, but in our lifetime we won't run out of oil per se.

But, with that said, it's going to get more and more expensive to get out. So, the question is when do we hit the break-even point where it makes sense to look at some of these alternatives that are actually better choices.

So what are some of the "better" choices?

Well, right now of course we have ethanol and biodiesel.

There's been lots of controversy recently about ethanol, certainly from corn. A lot of it is deceptive; you're drawing boxes around these fuels and saying they're consuming this much energy and this much water and doing this much damage to the environment when you make them. And it's really relative to how big you draw that box - the bigger you draw that box, the worse it gets. If you include the metal to build the building to produce the ethanol, certainly that's going to look pretty bad for ethanol.

But when you compare it to the life cycle of petroleum, it's not as bad as it seems. We're putting a lot more energy into getting the petroleum refined than we would be even to make corn ethanol - which isn't necessarily the best choice.

But the nice thing about corn ethanol is it sort of opened the door for biofuels. If we hadn't had such a strong corn lobby that was able to push that industry through and get it established like it is today, we wouldn't have biofuels right now.

And I think everyone knows (corn ethanol is) not going to be around forever, it doesn't make the most sense.

(But) they're blaming food prices on ethanol, and really you can trace that back more to worldwide population growth and demand for food more than biofuels - biofuels account for some percentage of that, but we'd have the same problems we're having now even if ethanol wasn't around.

With biodiesel we have a slightly more optimistic situation on the environmental side, but financially it's less optimistic. With ethanol you can actually make some money right now. With biodiesel, it's a much healthier life cycle in terms of using energy and water - you get a lot more bang for the buck. But the problem right now with biodiesel is that the oil itself costs so much because it's competing with the food market - you can't afford to make biodiesel and make money off of it.

So what does that mean? We have to look for new sources of carbohydrate and oil that don't compete with the food market. And I think in the next 10 years - I think; that's my disclaimer - but I think it's a safe bet to say we're still going to have biodiesel and ethanol, but they're not going to be from corn and soybeans like they are now.

What we'll probably see is ethanol from cellulose - wood, paper that kind of thing - and likely we'll be seeing biodiesel from algae. And I think in 10 years we will have a healthy algaculture industry - we're pretty close to developing algae as a reliable feedstock for oil production. And now that's producing triglycerides, which is what you make biodiesel from. It'll likely go into biodiesel in the beginning, but there are other options too - you can make it into real diesel fuel if you want to (not biodiesel). It may go in that direction, because you can literally pop it into the refinery with a little bit of up-front processing, and what comes out the other end is actually identical to diesel fuel.

So if the big boys get involved, that's what they're gonna do, because then none of the infrastructure has to change except for the front-end processing unit on the refinery.

And when you say big boys ...

Big oil, yeah.

What are the downsides environmentally to either of these - the ethanol or the biodiesel?

Well, with biodiesel you're using methanol to make it, so you are using something that either comes from natural gas or fossil fuels (and some people consider natural gas a fossil fuel), so there is 10 percent of that fuel that needs a petroleum-based product to be made. So that's one downside.

On the other hand, when you're talking about doing this hydro-treating, which is what they do at the refinery, we're still talking about diesel fuel that, when it comes out of the tailpipe of your car, it's still high in particulates, still high in pollutants you don't want, whereas biodiesel has a great drop in those emissions compared to the diesel fuel.

So you're going to worry about it on the way in or on the way out, I guess is what it comes down to.

Now there are biological ways to make alcohol that you could use in the biodiesel process that would eliminate some of that fossil fuel consumption.

What do you see 20 years down the road, then?

The other major pathway that we're starting to look at now ... that will hopefully be established in the next 20 years is thermo-chemical processing.

That takes any biomass that we're talking about, whether it's leaves and limbs that you cut down in your yard, or when they clearcut a forest to make pulp for paper, there's a lot of material that's left over to just sit there and rot: corn-stover that's left over in the corn field, cotton gin trash that's left over after you process cotton, all the waste residues from agriculture or paper processing and even some of the residues we make as humans, as in urban waste, goes into a process where it's heated without oxygen and breaks down into its component gases - it doesn't combust if there's no oxygen. This process produces carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen. You can then recombine those molecules into liquid fuels and chemicals using catalysts.

And that technology exists now - it started in World War II because Germany didn't have access to petroleum, and they were using this process to make liquid fuels for their diesel vehicles from coal. You can make ethanol using it, you can make a diesel analog, or basically any liquid hydrocarbon if you have the right ratio of those gases and the right catalyst.

Right now, it's expensive to do that. There's an ethanol plant being built in Soperton that's going to use that process. So we're starting to see this happen, and we do it in the lab all the time. You also get a charcoal product out of that - it's called char - that actually benefits the soil more than the biomass that would have been left there because it has high surface area, doesn't degrade and bacteria love it.

So are you optimistic about the future?

This may sound corny, but Americans have this wonderful way of figuring things out - right when they need to. When push comes to shove, technologically we'll get it done. So (I'm) optimistic only because what we started on a long time ago is finally starting to happen and will continue to happen at an accelerated rate.